About the Author

The author has a wife, two kids, and a minivan, but currently, no job (which affords me plenty of time to play WoW and blog). Unemployment is a recent development, though, and I’ve been playing WoW for over 3 years now, mostly evenings and the odd weekend when I can grab computer time from my two boys (and my wife), and from baseball (which I coach and my youngest plays), and the Performing Arts (which my oldest enjoys; I’m a Band Parent!).

My youngest wanted to get WoW (Classic) when a friend of his was playing. As he was a pre-teen, for the first couple of weeks, I merely followed over his shoulder as he ran around the world with his paladin. I was keeping an eye on his interactions with others, the whispers and the chats, mostly, and found myself drawn into this world that my child was exploring. I had previously played games like Tribes and AirWar, and so was generally familiar with in-game chats and combat strategies, and role-playing in general, but neither of those games had the depth of story nor the immersion of WoW.

He had rolled his pally on Steamwheedle Cartel because it was a “recommended” server, i.e. new and low-population. He knew it was an RP server, but he really only had basic RP, enjoying the server more for it’s lack of ganking as compared to a PvP server.

After a couple of weeks of watching him play, he had leveled to the point where he began to run instances and develop his toon’s professions and talents. Terms like “tanking”, “attack power” and “armor” aren’t readily apparent through gameplay; I became interested in both the game and the gameplay, and so created my own character, my first: Oilcan.

After reading up on the classes, a hunter was an obvious choice. The role-play of “living in the world” as a hunter seemed a natural, and like so many others, the appeal of having a pet was more than I could pass up. Creating Oilcan on the same server, SwC, I made a background story to explain the nickname (in RL, Oilcan was my high school nickname, and no, not from Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd, the Montreal Expo’s pitcher – I had it while he was still in the minors).

I’ve coached baseball for 20+ years, up to and including the college level, so I naturally began to analyze my new pastime. I found hunter sites and blogs, theory-crafting sites….I’ve read it all at one time or another. While I’ll leave the calculus equations to someone else, I have come to appreciate the balances within the game (and despise the imbalances), and to take the latest nerfs and buffs in stride.

I was hooked. The questing, the PvE, the PvP, the depth of mechanics and gameplay, the RP, all of it. I’ve been around long enough to say “I remember when….”